London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its
roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare,
Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who
sought to capture the essence of the place.
Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to
illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing
over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare's day to the present.
These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in
between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown.
Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great
Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray's account of
going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey's friendship with a
teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing's defense of the Underground.
This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth
Bowen's wartime streets, Charles Dicken's treacherous River Thames and
Frederick Treves's tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel
Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us
their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and
ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.
